Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine

Начало книги

I was seven years old when the Berlin Wall fell. Watching the news with my parents in New York, I wondered how a simple concrete barrier could be so important. Why hadn’t people just climbed over it? Newscasters discussed the “Iron Curtain,” which sounded scary, but also confusing. Didn’t curtains, by definition, ripple and fold?

I was sixteen when NATO bombed Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War. I assumed that Clinton had good reasons for intervening. Despite his sexual indiscretions, our president seemed like a kindly, paternal figure. At school I knew a nice Serbian boy who wrote poetry; he and his brother got into fights with the Albanian kids on the basketball court, but I couldn’t quite understand why. Anyway, we were teenagers; we had better things to think about.

I graduated from high school in the year 2000. A year earlier the seniors had chanted ninety-nine; as we celebrated that June, my friends and I chanted zero and laughed. Panic about Y2K had come to nothing; the world hadn’t ended with the old millennium. But disaster arrived the next year. From her high school classroom in downtown Manhattan, my younger sister saw two planes hit the Twin Towers. She and her classmates watched tiny figures leap from the burning buildings. Outside, FBI agents told the students, “Don’t look back, and run”: north, away from the fast-moving cloud of dust and death. Soon the United States was fighting a war, and then a series of wars, that became the permanent backdrop to our young adult lives.

Читать дальше →